There's talk that in the battle between the USA and Europe over control of ICANN, which may come to a head at the upcoming World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis, people will seriously consider "splitting the root" of DNS.

I've written a fair bit about how DNS works and how the true power over how names get looked up actually resides with hundreds of thousands of individual site administrators. However, there is a natural monopoly in the root. All those site admins really have to all do the same thing, or you get a lot of problems, which takes away most of that power.

Still, this is an interesting power struggle. If a large group of admins decided to switch to a new DNS root, different from ICANN, they could. The cooperation of Microsoft, which includes the default root list for IIS, and Paul Vixie, who puts that list in BIND, would play a large part in that as well.

In fact, many times in the past people have split the root by creating alternate, "superset" roots which mirror the existing .com/.org/.net/etc. and add new top level domains. Some of these have been "innocent" efforts frustrated at how slowly ICANN had created new TLDs, but in truth all of them have also been landgrabs, hoping to get ownership of more generic terms, furthering the mistake that was made with .com. ICANN is also furthering the mistake, just more slowly. (The mistake is ignoring what trademark law has known for centuries -- you don't grant ownership rights in ordinary generic terms.)

All of these superset attempts have also failed. I don't think I have ever seen anybody promote a URL using one of the alternate root TLDs, or give me an email address from an alternate root TLD. I consider that failure.

This is, of course, what creates the natural monopoly. Few people are interested in setting it up so that two different people looking for a domain get different results. That applies to the fact that most people get an error for www.drug.shop (in the new.net alternate TLDs) and a few get the registrant's site, but it applies even moreso to the idea that Americans would get one answer for foo.com and Europeans a different one.

Because of this, Larry Lessig recently suggested he wasn't worried about a root split because there would be such strong pressure to keep them consistent.

The difficulty is, what's the point of creating your own root if you can't actually make it any different from the original? The whole point of wanting control is to have your way when there is a dispute, and to have your way does not mean just doing it the same as everybody else lest we get inconsistent results.

It's possible that a group of nations might try to wrest control in order to do nothing at first, but eventually create a superset of TLDs which would, for the first time, be a success. That might work, since if all the nations of the world except the USA were to go to a new root set, it would be hard for the private individuals in the USA who control name servers not to follow. But then the new group would no doubt attempt at some point to issue policies for the existing top-level-domains and country code domains.

I was amused to hear folks on PRI's Marketplace radio program say that 99 cents for a rerun on the video iPod was a good price. Turns out that 99 cents includes commercials in that rerun, because people polled said they would rather pay 99 cents with commercials intead of $1.50 without them.

Everybody is annoyed at how long it takes computers to boot. Some use hibernate mode to save a copy of the system in a booted state, which is one approach. Booting procedures have also gotten better about running stuff in parallel.

I took a lot of photos in Australia, including of course, many panoramas. I've assembled some of the best panoramas.

You can see them in this gallery: Panoramas of Australia

After we picked up our rental car in Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia, the blasting heat told us we would like a cooler full of drinks on our 3 day road trip through the outback. So we stopped at a Woolworths and picked up one of those terrible foam coolers, ice and some drinks. There was no bar code on the cooler so we wasted what seemed like 10 minutes in the checkout because the clerk wasn't authorized to ring up an item as general merchandise. (Hint to stores: I know you're scared of your cashiers stealing from you but this is ridiculous.)

You may have heard of the idea of pollution credit trading. I've been pointed to two firms that are selling CO2 credits on the retail level for individuals, to offset the output from driving a car, heating a house etc.

I'll get into the details on how it works a bit below, but if you have a car like mine that is putting out 5 metric tons of CO2 each year, you can for a low price (about $50, which includes a whopping markup) pay a factory somewhere to cut their own output by 5 tons, meaning that net, you are causing zero emissions. Which means you are reducing total emissions by a lot more than you would by switching to a Prius, and you are doing it at a vastly lower cost. (This doesn't mean you shouldn't drive a Prius, it just means this is a lot more effective.)

Normally pollution credits are traded only by the big boys, trading contracts with hundreds or thousands of tonnes of emissions. The retail firms are letting small players get in the game.

This is a fabulous idea, in theory at least, and also a great, if sneaky gift idea. After all, if you buy the gift of not polluting for your loved one all they get is a bumper sticker and a good feeling. At least it's better than giving to The Human Fund in their name.

Here's the catch. I went and priced the credits, and while www.certifiedcleancar.com wanted $50 to credit my car, the actual price of credits on the Chicago Climate Exchange is about $2.16 per tonne of CO2, or about $8 for my actual output as they calculated it. One expects some markup, of course, and even some profit for the company selling the retail credits, but this is nuts. I called the other company, Terrapass and got reasonably frank answers. First of all, they claim they invest more in wind power and other truly non-polluting forms of energy more than they just buy carbon credits. Secondly, this is still a small volume thing, and most of the costs are not the credits, but the $20,000 or so to become a member of the exchange, or so I was told. And of course, in small volumes, administrative costs can swamp the real costs.

Another outfit I found is carbonfund.org which is non-profit and cheaper. In some sense since people buy these out of guilt rather than compulsion (they were meant to be forced on polluters to give money to non polluters and make a market) non-profit might make sense, but they are also supposed to be a real market.

Still, if I pay $50, I would love for my $50 to mostly go to reducing pollution, not mostly to administration. Usually when exchanges are expensive there are members who will trade for you at much more modest markups. The folks at Terrapass said they were not yet profitable at the current prices.

And it is such a good idea. Read below for more on pollution credits.

Yesterday I visited Tag Camp an impromptu weekend conference on tagging in the spirit of Foo Camp and the Bar Camp I wrote about earlier. User-applied tagging has become all the rage on sites like fickr and del.icio.us. I was pleased when one person at the conference saw my name and said, "hey you started all this."

As noted, in Australia, I picked up a SIM at the airport for my unlocked phone. Australia, like Europe and most other places outside North America, uses a system where incoming calls to cell phones are paid by the caller, and are free to the mobile owner. As you may know, in North America and a small number of other countries, the mobile owner pays for airtime on incoming calls, and they look like ordinary landline calls to the caller.

Of course, if you don't answer your cell phone it goes to voice mail and plays your pre-recorded message.

But what we need are phones which can answer and play a pre-recorded message for a short time. In particular a message of the form, "Hold on, I'm in a meeting and must keep silent. However, I'm walking out of the meeting right now while you hear this recording, and in a few seconds I'll be able to talk to you. Hold on... Still walking..."

When I visit a foreign place, it's interesting to note what everyday things are done differently there, what's caught on and what hasn't. (P.S. I now have my panoramas up.)

Recently I purchased an external battery for my Thinkpad. The internal batteries were getting weaker, and I also needed something for the 14 hour overseas flights. I picked up a generic one on eBay, a 17 volt battery with about 110 watt-hours, for about $120. It's very small, and only about 1.5 lbs. Very impressive for the money. (When these things first came out they had half the capacity and cost more like $300.)

One of the more interesting results in human sexuality was the study that revealed that women prefer the smell of men whose immune systems are the most different from their own. In the study, women were given a variety of men's T-shirts (used) and asked which ones smelled the most appealing. It was found they liked the most men who had different genetic immunities from their own.

I've arrived this morning in Melbourne, a very pleasant city in which I haven't allocated enough time, as per usual. Lots of interesting food, seems very livable with great transit, pleasant spaces and parks and architecture. And also surveillance cameras, everywhere. And warnings about stopping terrorism even though there hasn't really been much here.

Recently I attended a panel that covered, among other things the universal service fund. This fund, which you usually see as an add-on on your phone bill, taxes urban phone users (through their interstate carriers) to subsidize local phone service for the poor, the rural, schools and health care. Sounds noble, but it collected over 5 billion dollars in 2002, and now the question has come about how to apply it to the internet now that people are making phone calls over the internet.

IPTV is the new buzzword for video over IP, in particular as it relates to DSL/phone companies wanting to compete with cable companies and give you TV using your DSL. (The cable companies are hard at work at giving you phone service over your cable modem.)

Recently, I discovered something that others have known for a while but many don't know. Namely that effectively all modern cars that say they should use Premium (high-octane) gasoline run perfectly fine on regular. Since the early 90s, cars have had more advanced carb/fuel-injector systems which adjust to the octane of the gas and don't knock. Like an idiot, I've been filling my car with premium. The engineers at all the major car vendors have confirmed this.

Klein Gilhousen, one of the founders of Qualcomm, proposed this evening at Gilder's Telecosm that cell phones be modified, if an emergency shuts down the towers, to do some basic mesh networking, not so much for voice, but for text messaging and perhaps pust-to-talk voice packets, as well as location information from their internal GPS if present.

At every conference I go to, with a few rare exceptions, we always see people wasting time fiddling with computers and projectors in order to show their presentation, which is (sadly) almost always in powerpoint. Many laptops won't switch displays until they see a monitor on the VGA port, which makes things take longer.

So how about a wireless protocol for sending presentations from laptops to projectors or a computer connected to the projector. Over 802.11 or bluetooth, presumably.

In recent times, I and my colleagues at the Foresight Nanotech Institute have moved towards discouraging the idea of self-replicating machines as part of molecular nanotech. Eric Drexler, founder of the institute, described these machines in his seminal work "Engines of Creation," while also warning about the major dangers that could result from that approach.

Recently, dining with Ray Kurzweil on the release of his new book The Singularity Is Near : When Humans Transcend Biology, he expressed the concern that the move away from self-replicating assemblers was largely political, and they would still be needed as a defence against malevolent self-replicating nanopathogens.

I understand the cynicism here, because the political case is compelling. Self-replicators are frightening, especially to people who get their introduction to them via fiction like Michael Chrichton's "Prey." But in fact we were frightened of the risks from the start. Self replication is an obvious model to present, both when first thinking about nanomachines, and in showing the parallels between them and living cells, which are of course self-replicating nanomachines.

The movement away from them however, has solid engineering reasons behind it, as well as safety reasons. Life has not always picked the most efficient path to a result, just the one that is sufficient to outcompete the others. In fact, red blood cells are not self-replicating. Instead, the marrow contains the engines that make red blood cells and send them out into the body to do their simple job.

Read on

Many are commenting on the gasoline shortages and price increases involved with hurricane evacuation and other emergencies. Some people can't get gas to get out of the city. Others full up giant tanks even when they don't need it. Stations raise prices as supply drops and demand increases, as per the normal rules of the market. Some suggest the stations be price-controlled to stop this, but that would only result in even more gas hoarding by the public.